of a falling out and of falling

The second dream last night was much more of a standard nightmare for me.

I was the third partner in a law firm. It became apparent very quickly that things in the firm had been going badly for some time. There were allegations of wrong-doing and we had just received word that day that we were being investigated.

The other two partners seemed to blame each other. At first, their frustrations vented as simple shouts across the hall from one office to the next. But shouting alone didn't seem to settle the matter.

It wasn't long before I found myself quite literally caught in the middle as I was attempting to pull the other two men off of each other as the first few punches flew. There were shouts about clients, about accounting discrepancies - not much of it made sense to me. What made immediate sense was the fury in each other's eyes.

As with all dreams, there are holes in my recollection. After the hole in this dream, I found that the not-guilty partner and I were located in an abandoned upper floor office in an attempt to barricade the door. Somewhere off in the distance was the guilty partner. We knew he was armed with at least a knife.

As I peaked out through a crack in the door, I discovered that I had sadly underestimated the threat he posed, as he now had a handgun and an axe. All sanity seemed to have left his eyes. There was only murder and bloodlust in them now.

Our barred door didn't hold up long and it's only moments before the axe-wielding partner entered. There was a scuffle by the window. I was apparently armed as well because I locked the knife I was holding with the axe being swung at me. My arm took a pretty deep gash, but I wasn't cleaved in two so I consider it a victory.

I could feel my knife sliding deeper and deeper into his wrist. I know that one of us is going to die but I can't figure out who it's going to be. With a kick, we broke apart from our bloody tangle. I'm not sure who kicked who.

Next thing I knew, I stumbled out in the hallway again, scrambling for the handgun he had dropped before entering the room. He turned around and began stalking me with the axe, its head already stained with my blood.

I raised the pistol, aimed directly at his heart, and told him to "stop." My hands were shaking so badly I hardly knew if I'd be able to coordinate the thoughts necessary to pull the trigger. He didn't stop and I could feel myself tumble off of a moral precipice somewhere in my head as I pulled the trigger for the first time.

Click.

The chamber was empty. He smiled and came closer.

Click. Still empty. He started to laugh. My hands were shaking horribly. I could see my own blood clotting on the axe head.

Click.

I was doing my best to stay focused and not contemplate my own death. I pulled the trigger again.

There was an explosion. A bullet flew out of the chamber while the kickback kicked me back a few feet. I watched in horror as the bullet traveled the short distance between us and then seemed to hover just outside of his body.

At first, I though it was going to simply fall to the ground. Slowly, though, the bullet pushed its way into his skin. It looked painful - more painful than a regular gun shot - but he didn't seem to be phased by it so I fired again. Three or four more shots all left the gun. Each one slowly pushed their way into his skin.

Something was wrong with him, he was doing his best to walk forward but might have been in the midst of dying at the same time. Whatever it was that was distracting him, it was enough that I could grab his arm and toss him behind me. Without any resistance, he flew forward, smashed through a glass window, and plummeted.

I ran to the window and looked down just in time to see him fall the remaining few feet to the ground, smash through the rear window of his own limousine, and saw his body come to rest in a bloody mess of dress clothes and tinted splinters of glass.

of the long descent

I've been having more and more nightmares recently and hardly ever taking the time to write them down here. I'm certainly not sleeping well. There's something about dreaming such vivid, distressing dreams that completely wipes me out and makes me wake up feeling as though I need another eight hours of sleep.

Last night I had two nightmares. The first was rather subtle. It might not even make much sense written down. The other, though, was pretty overtly disturbing and will no doubt make sense. Let's start with the first one.

Last night, I dreamt I was running away from my family. There was no particular reason other than an intense desire to not be found by them.

And so I ran, down streets, along fields, familiar locations - snippets of locations from other dreams as though running through a movie backlot. I was fast. More impressively, I was nimble. I could jump over rocks, dash my way across treacherous paths - nothing stood in my way.

That is, until I came to the stream. As I approached the cold waters of the rushing stream, I could hear the voice of my family close by, hunting me like a pack of dogs. In trying to test the waters, one of my sandals fell off into the rushing current and was swept away. With little else in the way of options and growing more agitated with each moment, I jumped into the icy cold stream and snuck my way under a bridge to hide from my family like a troll.

When they failed to see me, they continued on their way and I on mine along through the chilly waters of the stream. Eventually, the stream gave way to a small suburban neighborhood.

I knew the layout. I knew I had been there before in other dreams. Nearby was the small, cramped passage way that led into further subterranean chambers. I found myself only two manicured lawns away from a full escape when the voices of my family returned. Cutting around off of the path I apparently usually travel in my dreams, I found that I could slip undetected into the narrow stone opening that lead to the first underground gate.

The further down I went, the more there grew in my stomach a knot of fear. Past the dirty, collapsed concrete walls of the first underground level. Past the ancient white mud-walled hole that served as the second level. Past the claustrophobic tunnel full of a hellish red light that I had to slither through on my back, for the roof was too low to even crawl. Down the long, creaking wooden stairway that led to the last of the underground levels:

The basement of my old house.

There it was, the basement of the house I lived in as a teenager. Here the sense of dread and pain and fear was like a constant weight. Cobwebs and a layer of dirt covered everything. At the far end of the basement was a massive wooden door and it was only then that I realized it was towards this door - and not from my family - that I had been running all along.

The door was huge - 8 feet tall, 4 feet wide - and cracked open a few inches. I knelt before the massive door and could see that inside was complete and total darkness. Despite its completely impenetrable nothingness, from out of that door came a voice, the voice of ADAM.

I don't know who ADAM is, but in my dream, he scared me to my very core. I knew ADAM was something primal, an ancient and buried maleficence that knew every dark thought I'd ever had and who confronted me with them in a rush of misery. It was as though I were about to die and my life was flashing before me except that ADAM was a filter that blocked everything but the bad, the painful, the dark and unwanted memories I'd buried, forgotten, or purged.

In the end, I think I fainted. I know that it all ended down in that basement, in front of the door and in front of ADAM. What any of it means, though, I haven't the faintest idea.